Oxygen therapy is used in patients with acute respiratory failure and in other categories of patients without acute respiratory failure, for example for patient with acute myocardial infarction and in post-operative time. Acute respiratory distress is a common cause of hospital admission. During the initial treatment of this clinical situation, the symptomatic treatment plays a major role in reducing complications and improving prognosis. At the forefront of symptomatic treatment is oxygen therapy (OT). OT given to acutely ill people is therefore one of the most common interventions used in modern medicine. However, although the basic principles of OT have been established by painstaking quantitative research over the past 60 years, in practice, most people use oxygen by following customary and generalized practice. When administered correctly, OT may be life saving, but OT is often given without careful evaluation of its potential benefits and side-effects.
Inappropriate dose and failure to monitor treatment can have serious consequences. Omissions and errors are commonly found concerning hospital oxygen use. Oxygen prescription and/or delivery is associated with significantly greater error than that seen with other medications such as antibiotics for example. In several hospital surveys, from 21 to 80% of oxygen prescriptions outside intensive care unit (ICU) environment were determined to be inappropriate in some studies, and 85% of patients were inadequately supervised according to standards. The oxygen dosage is frequently overestimated and frequently underestimated. This poor oxygen prescription rate carries serious potential consequences in both cases.
Another problem that can frequently be observed within units is that OT is not rapidly weaned when no longer required, whereas a clinically stable patient with a certain oxygen flow is considered as “routine”. The clinician is often reluctant to decrease the oxygen flow of a stable patient due to the potential risk of subsequent instability. Thus, OT may also induce indirect hospital stay increase, only given the fact that frequent “manual” prescription adaptation may require increases in the staff workload.
In chronic hypoxic patients, survival is improved by long-term OT (LTOT). Such patients often desaturate during activity and at night, despite continuous LTOT administration. Excluding patients with obstructive sleep apnea, episodes of desaturation (SpO2≦85%) occur during daytime activity and at night during phasic REM sleep in almost 6±10% of the time, even under oxygen (continuous flow). These desaturation episodes often remains occult, whereas routine SpO2 monitoring is rarely performed; without automatic adaptation of the oxygen flow to the SpO2 signal, continuous monitoring may in fact be totally inefficient. Survival is known to be worse, at least for patients who desaturate at night.
Against this background, there exists a need in the industry to provide novel methods and devices for improved methods and devices for administering oxygen to a patient and monitoring the patient. An object of the present invention is therefore to provide improved methods and devices for administering oxygen to a patient.